We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
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While you might think free parking in NHS hospitals is a bit of throwaway populist fluff, it still tells you a lot about how populists think. If they do not see the immediate value in administration then it simply shouldn’t exist.
We then get some confirmation of how Lowe thinks from an interview with David Starkey. Lowe wants to recruit candidates who are accomplished business leaders (basically people like Rupert Lowe).
Regardless of what you think of Lowe’s values (there’s not much I disagree with), the bottom line is that he’s hopelessly naïve and has absolutely no idea what he’s doing. Starkey is right. Politics is not business. Businessmen are often successful because they take risks, and delegate the details to their people. It does not make them experts, and it does not mean their business success is transferrable to politics. Setting things up is a lot different to running things (as Lowe is about to discover).
Very often businessmen have very little understanding of the day to day running of their businesses. They hire people to do that for them so they can think about other things. We saw this during Brexit, where the media was asking CEOs how Brexit might affect their businesses, to find they were no more informed about the complexities of EU customs rules than the man in the street.
– Pete North
Read the whole thing as it is an interesting practical discussion about allocation of scarce resources
UK has not given US permission to use RAF bases for Iran strikes… ok, I get it, bonehead Trump has acted in ways that make it clear the Atlantic alliance of yore is now largely dead, for which there are serious geopolitical consequences. But surely, given there still are US bases are on British territory, at least for now, and the theocratic Iranian government is a manifestly unfriendly power, hampering US strikes on the mass murderous mullahs is perverse. That too will have geopolitical consequences.
The lunatic UKGov wants to give Chagos to an ally of China (and pay for the ‘privilege’ of giving them away, for reasons that must surely boil down to naked corruption), I imagine US has drawn up contingency plans to simply take Diego Garcia over if worse comes to worse, with all that implies.
To be clear, none of this has much to do with actual right-wing or conservative political thought. If you’re wearing tweed and reading Sir Roger Scruton, please carry on.
The influencer ecosystem I once inhabited was the Chernobyl-ass Frankenstein of right-wing politics. A radioactive, reanimated corpse stitched together from clout, resentment, and cocaine, which desperately needs to be taken out back and shot for everyone’s good (it’s own included). Unfortunately, monsters are hard to kill
– Lauren Southern
“UK minimum wage is raising youth unemployment, Bank of England’s Mann says” – Reuters, Feb 15th 2026
Do you remember your first crappy job? Today’s young people would wish for half your luck, writes Gaby Hinsliff in the Guardian, Feb 20th 2026:
This week, unemployment rates for 18- to 24-year-olds hit a high not seen outside the pandemic since 2015. School leavers are now competing for work stacking shelves or pulling pints with overqualified new graduates who can’t find graduate jobs, at a time when pubs, shops and cafes don’t seem to be hiring. Even those employers strong enough to have survived lockdown routinely complain that it’s getting too expensive to hire staff – especially young ones.
The Centre for Policy Studies thinktank calculates that it will cost 26% more to hire an 18- to 20-year-old by this spring than it did in 2024. That reflects government decisions taken for perfectly good reasons, including hiking employers’ national insurance to fund the NHS, plus two chunky rises to the minimum wage for the under-20s (now £10 an hour) in line with manifesto promises to level it up with the higher adult rate (now £12.21) over the course of a parliament. No matter how noble the motive, once it costs the same to hire four teenage Starmers as it once did to hire five, there are likely to be consequences. Yet until this week, when an internal Labour argument about whether they could be inadvertently pricing young people out of work spilled on to newspaper front pages, political debate over why so many young people don’t have jobs has mostly involved blaming them for being anxious snowflakes. Injury, meet insult.
I am truly, non-sarcastically impressed that Ms Hinsliff and a few other left-wing commenters are now willing to admit that “there are likely to be consequences” to increasing the minimum wage. Hearing that word, “consequences”, enter left-wing discussions of workers’ pay is like a glimpse of a little mammalian form scurrying through the dust kicked up by a brontosaurus.
Our judges will bend over backwards to find ways to allow people who ought to be deported to remain, and will connive with charities performing strategic litigation in order to allow this to happen. And their genuflections have become so convoluted that it is almost pointless to try to subject them to careful doctrinal analysis. We simply need to cut to the chase: the problem is not a legal, but a political or even sociological one. It is an issue concerning the makeup of the judiciary itself.
– David McGrogan
Read the whole thing.
The British State did not want Birmingham to be portrayed as a “no go zone” for Jews. Instead they submitted fabricated evidence to the Birmingham Safety Advisory Group to secure the ban. For example, they falsely attributed to Tel Aviv fans actions taken against them by Muslims in the Netherlands at a previous match. They said Israelis had thrown Muslims into canals, when the truth (as subsequently confirmed by Dutch police) was the precise opposite. Dutch Muslims on an organised “Jew Hunt” (their words not mine) had actually committed the violent acts that English Muslims were threatening.
West Midlands Police offered no evidence to the authorities about the actual threats. With the usual excuse of potential damage to “community relations”, they falsely portrayed the visitors as the danger. “Community relations” with Britain’s Jews or (still less) Britain’s relations with Israel were not a concern, apparently.
Essentially his force was guilty of cowardice. They bowed before a threat of violence. They were too gutless to be honest about it.
– Tom Paine
Youth unemployment has surged to 16.1%, meaning that one in six young people want a job but can’t find one. It’s no surprise when some estimate that half of the over 200,000 jobs lost since Labour took office have been among the youngest.
– Andrew Griffith.
For those who don’t recall, the expression “Labour Isn’t Working” was the banner of a Conservative Party election campaign of 1979, and while unemployment rose sharply in the early term of office of the Thatcher period – that was also a period of the monetarist squeeze against inflation – the devastating impact on the Labour Party of being associated with unemployment – and union mayhem and inflation cannot be overstated. Even today, the shame of a party that used to bang on about the “dignity of labour”, when many working-aged adults aren’t in employment or seeking it, should be far higher than it is. But as we seem to be reminded almost daily with this clanking and sanctimonious government, a sense of shame appears to be absent. Being a socialist, it seems, means never having to say you’re sorry, and never having to understand that incentives matter.
Under the Bank Secrecy Act, one of the most common reasons for filing a suspicious activity report (often abbreviated as SAR) is because someone deposited or withdrew nearly $10,000 in cash. That’s all it takes for you to get labeled as “suspicious” in an official report to the government.
These reports rarely catch actual criminals. Yet, each report is like a red mark on your banking record, nonetheless. And getting too many of these reports filed on you can quickly spell trouble. If you rack up multiple reports (often as few as three), banks will close the account. The bank might know you are likely innocent, but the risk of regulators punishing them for inaction is too high. Fines for failing to report real criminal activity can reach into the millions.
It’s much safer for the bank to close the account than risk fines later, especially if it is a smaller account.
– Nicholas Anthony
Soon Brits will need Starlink + VPN to read the news. Like Iran
– Douglas Carswell
3. The Big Tent vs. The One-Man Island. Farage: Even when he’s the “dictator” of a party, he keeps the machinery moving toward a single goal (Brexit, Reform). Lowe: Recently launched Restore Britain (Feb 2026) because he couldn’t play nice with others. His “my way or the highway” approach suggests a Prime Minister who would resign by lunchtime if his Cabinet didn’t like his choice of stationery.
– Steve Scrase
Read the whole thing, its both on the money & quite humorous.
I met Rupert Lowe at the Paul Staines Guido Fawkes goodbye dinner, SWMBO was sat next to him and I was next to her. Well, a couple hours at the same table turned my previously very favourable opinion of Lowe 180 degrees. He does not like to be questioned and trots out personal prejudices as if they were evidence. If he can piss off natural supporters who come predisposed to like and agree with him, I don’t think this is a man who can build a party machine to “restore” anything.
For the first time anyone can remember, in a contest for a Westminster seat in an English city, the two parties vying for power won’t be Labour or the Conservatives, but instead be two insurgent outsiders. This is a twin-pronged revolt against the political mainstream – against a clique that has become ever more detached and tin-eared since the advent of globalisation in the 1990s.
The concerns articulated by both outfits, Reform UK and the Green Party, mirror those seen in all developed countries around the globe. In Reform, we have a party that appeals to small-c conservatives and a disaffected working class who inhabit deindustrialised areas, who feel their homeland has been degraded by an aloof, footloose liberal-left who cares little for them or their country. In the Greens, we have a party that has enjoyed a surge in popularity by taking a sharp turn to the left, appealing to a graduate class for whom the ‘elites’ are instead neoliberal capitalists, who must be humbled through punitive tax hikes. The Greens have remained steadfast passengers on the woke bandwagon, still proud to fly the Progress Pride flag, while simultaneously making gainful overtures to Muslim voters. Time will tell how well that interesting marriage works out.
– Patrick West
And here is where Britain’s particular brand of suicidal virtue-signalling becomes lethal. The Liberal West, and Britain most zealously, has spent fifteen years chasing Net Zero with the fervour of a medieval flagellant. We’ve shuttered coal, dithered on nuclear, blanketed the countryside with unreliable windmills, and now face the grim prospect of energy rationing. The National Grid’s own forecasts admit that data centres alone could consume 7-10% of UK electricity by 2030, and that’s before the real AI boom hits. Microsoft, Google, and the rest are already scrambling for power purchase agreements that dwarf entire cities. Yet our political class still preens about “green leadership” while quietly preparing the public for blackouts and sky-high bills.
– Gawain Towler
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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